WEST
TEXAS
PULLING A CHAIN AND
RAISING A FAMILY ACROSS
BIG OIL COUNTRY
rebecca d. henderson

Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC 29403
www.historypress.net
Copyright ÂŠ 2014 by Rebecca D. Henderson
All rights reserved
First published 2014
Manufactured in the United States
ISBN 978.1.62619.380.2
Library of Congress CIP data applied for.

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is
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quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For Bob D and Ann. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m proud to belong to you.
And for Pete, Jim, Pat, Kathi, and Kay.

n so many ways, this book was a group effort. Though I took on this
project as a labor of love for my grandparents, many people helped make
each step of the process possible.
Great thanks go to my Kickstarter backers—family, friends, friends of
friends, and complete strangers. You contributed the money to make the
travel and writing happen, and I am grateful that you saw promise in my idea.
For your enthusiasm for stories of old-time Texas surveyors, special thanks
to the men at Goodwin & Marshall, Inc.: Matt Goodwin, Matt Baacke,
Edward Eckart, and Warren Russell. More thanks go out to upper-level
backers Jason and Suzie Goodell, Donnie and Sandy Tucker, Valerie Wicks,
Lydia Alles, Andy and Jane Cassinelli, Darius and Karen Coakley, Jim and
Sherry Henderson, Geary Lindberg, Pete and Roxie McCutcheon, Debbi
Neal, Christy Newton, James and Christy Ng, Danny and Beth Rumple,
Tiffany Sanders, Carol Schultz, Barbara and Tom Sullivan, Jim Sullivan,
Pat Wong, and Doris Yun. There were others who gave top-level amounts
but asked not to be recognized—you know who you are, and I thank you.
For many acts of kindness during the research and writing, I thank Karen
Coakley, Barbara Sullivan, Marilyn Smith, Andy and Jane Cassinelli, Abner
and Laura Solano, and Jennifer Anderson.
For tremendous insight, direction, and encouragement to write the best
book I possibly could, thank you to my editor, Christen Thompson.
For all the help with travel arrangements, American Express gift cards,
cheerleading, and replies to random e-mails with questions like, “What was

Acknowledgements
the name of that kid who was your boyfriend when you were three?”, thank
you to Pat Henderson. And for the seemingly endless help with photos and
valuable artistic advice, thank you to Randy Hatcher. The two of you helped
me form this book idea from the start, and you did what was necessary to
help me finish.
For asking me every day for months how the writing was going, thank you
to Stephen Smotherman. Talking to you makes the long days light.
For pretty much everything you’ve ever given me in life, thank you to my
parents, Pete and Linda Henderson. I could write an entire book of thanks
to you.
And of course, thank you to Bob D and Ann Henderson for living a
dream and sharing your adventure with me. I love you very much and am
grateful for how you’ve helped me become who I am.

8

Introduction

W

est Texas is the best Texas, as anyone who has been there will tell
you. Texas isn’t known for mountains, but that’s a shame, for Texas’s
mountains are a wilderness treasure. The desert of West Texas surpasses its
mountains in fame, but in truth, the two landscapes are hard to separate.
One complements the other in temperament and countenance.
The voice of West Texas called to me throughout my life, but I was well
into adulthood before I responded and made my first trip out there. For as
long as I could remember, my father had told me about growing up in small
towns far west of our home near Fort Worth, obscure towns like Monahans
and Sanderson and Big Lake, where he had played with his siblings in the
dust and dirt of the desert streets. He mentioned moving a lot when he was
a kid, going to three different schools in three different towns during his
first grade year. After returning from my first West Texas camping trip with
friends, I was eager to share my travels with my dad, to hear his impressions
of the places in my photos.
As my father looked through my digital slideshow, he came to a shot of a
striking mountain with a flat face as viewed from the highway approaching
the Guadalupe Mountains. “That’s El Capitan,” he said. “Daddy used that
mountain as a sight for his measurements all throughout that area—you can
see it from a long ways away.”
My grandfather’s job in the 1950s remained mysterious to me. He once
told me he worked for “Continental”—I scribbled the name down, not sure
what kind of company it might be. Later I realized he was talking about the

Introduction
oil giant Conoco, or Continental Oil Company, where he worked as a land
surveyor on its West Texas crew, surveying every piece of land it leased and
staking the wells to be drilled throughout the region in the 1950s. Each new
lease and each new well meant a new work location for the crew and, as a
result, a new home for the crew’s families. For the first thirteen years of my
grandparents’ marriage, their lives were lived out of suitcases, motels, and
station wagons. Many young wives would consider this lifestyle a nightmare,
but my grandmother talked about it like they were on a grand adventure.
When you’re eighteen and in love with the high school football captain, I
suppose just about anything can be an adventure.
A few weeks before I had taken off with my friends to camp, I had dinner
with my Aunt Pat and her husband, Randy, at their house in North Texas
and questioned them about places I needed to see on my road trip. While
waiting for dinner to finish cooking, drink in hand, I made my way along the
walls of their living area, admiring photo after photo that Randy had taken
on their trips to West Texas and other places in the western United States.
In one section of the room, photos of quirky-colored shop doorways stood
next to a print of cow skulls arranged on an adobe wall at the Gage Hotel
in Marathon. But the image most captivating to my eye was of a looming
red cliff, jagged rocks covering its immense face, the late afternoon sunshine
lighting the surface in a way that made the rock seem to glow from within. A
canyon wall, an emblem of the Desert Southwest.
“You should talk to Mother and Dad about your trip,” Pat said from the
island in her kitchen, referring to my paternal grandparents. “Dad will be
thrilled to tell you places you should go. And you can go through some of the
slides with them, find out more about the places we lived.”
The slides—a set of several hundred photos from the 1950s, much
discussed and frequently viewed by our family in recent days. My
grandparents had kept them in a couple of boxes in the closet for decades,
some filed in their original magazines and labeled with short notations of
their contents: “Pat’s 2nd birthday,” “kids in Levis,” “boys in suits.” Others
of the slides were loose in the boxes, unorganized by date and unlabeled by
content. Holding them up to the light, they might show scenes of family life,
or they might reveal a surveying tripod set up against the barren landscape
where my grandfather and his crew worked, or an intriguing configuration
of clouds over a field of corn, or a herd of cattle facing the camera, mouths
stopped in mid-chew. For over a decade, my grandfather documented our
family’s life and surroundings in images that captured the essence of that
time and place: 1950s West Texas. Pat and Randy had recently taken on the
10

Introduction
project of bringing order to the photos, scanning them into digital format to
make them easier to share among the rest of the family. Randy spent hours
tediously arranging the slides on a tray, loading them into the scanner, and
uploading them to a website that we could each access.
During the following months, I pored over the individual images
dozens of times in an attempt to piece together a timeline and map in
my mind, a cobbled history of my family’s life in West Texas—a time of
their lives that ended when my father was still a boy. But in the beginning,
the slides consisted of an overwhelming mess of family photos with no
meaning to me, no context beyond the fact that I knew at one point my
grandparents and their five children didn’t live on their ranch in North
Texas, but in West Texas, a place they talked about with nostalgia and
mystery and conviction. Like the self-absorbed person I was in my teens
and twenties, though, I had brushed off so many of their stories, not
asking any questions about that time in their lives, not really caring about
their experiences beyond the novelty that they had spent a few years
somewhere other than Jack and Wise Counties near Fort Worth. I had
little idea of what they had done or why they had been in the remote
towns I heard them mention from time to time through the years, towns
like Fort Davis, Aspermont, Stamford, and Texline.
And Pecos. Always Pecos. I knew Pecos as the place my dad was born and
the town my grandparents mentioned the most when talking about their
years in West Texas. Pecos is the origin of my dad’s nickname, Pete, after the
Pecos Pete character of Old West tall tales—the name my dad, Bob Jr., has
gone by for decades to differentiate him from his own father, Bob Sr. Pecos
made an impression on my mind, if for nothing other than the fact that I was
proud I could pronounce it correctly: PAY-cuss.
“And be sure to ask Mother about your dad’s squirrel,” Aunt Pat said. She
had finished setting the table for dinner and was putting the last touches on
the meal.
“Squirrel?” I asked. “Dad’s never mentioned a squirrel.”
“Just ask her.”
And so I began visiting my grandparents, Ann and Bob D, to ask them
about their life in West Texas, taking along a DVD or an iPad containing
hundreds of the images scanned from the slides. We sat in the living room
of their ranch house and flipped through the images on the screen while I
asked questions. I also brought along a yellow legal pad and my large 2010
version of Rand McNally The Road Atlas for the United States, often opened
to “Texas/Western” beside me on the couch. My goal for our times together
11

Introduction
was to jot down additional captions for the slides as well as to get ideas for
my own travels to West Texas.
I scribbled notes on the legal pad as Bob D and Ann shared names of
places they had lived in or visited, but I soon found it hard to keep up. The
towns they listed were too unusual to me, too unfamiliar—my mental map
of Texas ended somewhere east of Abilene and north of San Angelo.
“We lived at Monahans. Colorado City. Sweetwater,” Ann said. She
paused to think. “Between Abilene and Pecos along Highway 80, we lived
everywhere but Midland, Odessa, and Stanton.”
I squinted at the small print of the towns in the atlas, now along Interstate
20 instead of Highway 80, noting other towns that she hadn’t mentioned.
“So you lived at Big Spring?”
“Twice,” Ann said. “And twice at Big Lake. Eden. Coleman. Texline.
Most places we didn’t live more than six months, sometimes just a couple of
weeks. We stayed at Pecos almost three years, and three years at Sweetwater.”
I knew that they had moved around a lot, but my list seemed almost absurd.
The number of place names on my legal pad topped out at twenty-one towns
between 1950 and 1963. I had determined to come up with a definitive list of
towns, in order, with the dates the family had lived in each place, but the longer
I talked to Ann, the clearer it became that this was not a small task.
At one point I went back to the top of the page to clarify. “So you moved
from Monahans to Colorado City? What year was that?”
“No,” Ann said. “We went from Monahans to Sanderson. Pete was in
first grade.”
“So when did you live in Colorado City?”
“Well, we moved there from Pecos. Pat was an itty bitty thing, I remember
that, itty bitty when we got to Colorado City.”
I knew Pat was born in 1954. And my dad would have been in first grade
around 1957. The list on my legal pad was not in order. A couple more
clarifying questions, and I knew that the list wasn’t exactly in order in Ann’s
head either. She could tell me which town each kid had which birthday in,
where they lived when the babies had their six-week check-ups, where each
one of them learned to walk—but she couldn’t, as I had assumed she could,
recite the towns in order with their dates like a fifth grader listing out the
presidents of the United States. I tucked away in the back of my mind the
idea that I would one day help her piece that information into a timeline, but
for now I had a trip to plan. I changed tactics.
“Bob D, where do you recommend I go while I’m out there?” I called him
by the name I’ve used since I could call him anything. When I was born, the
12

Introduction
first grandchild, the family asked my grandfather what he wished me to call
him. His answer: “If she wants to talk to me, I reckon she’ll call me by my
name like everyone else.” And so he became Bob D, short for Robert Dewey.
Ann had already regaled me with stories of Big Bend and how they had
driven eighty-nine miles from the sign that said “Entering Big Bend National
Park” before they saw a campground, before they saw “anything but cactus
and that kind of stuff.” She said that driving up to Santa Elena Canyon,
watching it get closer and closer, bigger and bigger, for the last ten miles, and
then standing at the Rio Grande beneath the one-thousand-foot-tall cliffs,
was the smallest she had ever felt in her life.
Bob D leaned back in his recliner, his feet propped up in front of him. The
light from the window directly behind him made it difficult for me to see his
face, mostly a silhouette.
He cleared his throat. “Beck, I’d say you’ve gotta go to Paint Rock.”
I turned back to Rand McNally and peered at the Big Bend area, the
wide-open spaces around Marathon, Alpine, Fort Davis, and Marfa. My
finger traced the highways, pausing at tiny dots of towns in the far-flung
counties of Brewster, Terrell, Presidio, Jeff Davis, the border area where the
Rio Grande makes a crook in its elbow as it bends down toward the Mexican
state of Chihuahua before flexing its arm back up to El Paso.
“Paint Rock…” I trailed off. My pointer finger slid over the counties in
the curve of the river’s elbow again, my eyes scanning the highways for Paint
Rock. At last I found it, not in the border area, but closer to the middle of
the state, not far from San Angelo. The dot for Paint Rock, at the junction of
U.S. Highway 83 and County Road 380, isn’t filled in but open in the middle,
indicating that it’s the county seat for Concho County. The map legend
shows that the “size of type on map indicates relative population”—and
despite that open dot of county seat status, the relative population indicated
by the font size for Paint Rock is small, 273 people in the 2010 census.
Bob D shifted in his recliner. “You oughtta go to Paint Rock while you’re
out there. You oughtta go there at least once,” he said.
I jotted a couple of notes at the top of my legal pad as he explained the
merits of Paint Rock, a quarter mile of cliffs with Indian paintings that he
wished he could return to visit again.
So many spots to visit in just that one corner of the vast state. The
pictographs at Paint Rock, the ruins at Fort Davis, the Davis Mountains,
the Pecos River, the Monahans Sandhills, the town squares in so many little
places where my family had lived in the ’50s. My list of places to see grew
and grew.
13

Introduction
As did my list of books I wanted to read about the area and its history.
I devoured the stories of Big Bend homesteader J.O. Langford and Alpine
rancher Ted Gray, who also happened to be Ann’s family friend from her
hometown of Wizard Wells. I scoured bookstores and libraries for works on
the towns where my grandparents had lived, as well as books about the oil
boom. I longed to know more about the era of my grandparents’ younger
years and the job my grandfather had done for Conoco.
I eagerly perused a copy of Conoco: The First One Hundred Years, published
by Continental Oil Company in 1975. The book teems with vintage photos
and high-flown stories of the grand old days of the early oil industry in
America. A turn of the pages shows the same thing found in other books
on oil booms, in Texas or elsewhere—much attention is given to the
executives, the wildcatters, the drillers and roughnecks and roustabouts, but
no mention is made of the surveyors. Brief tribute is paid to those who did
the preparatory work for pipelines, and slightly longer descriptions are given
to the seismograph crews (or “doodlebuggers,” as Bob D taught me to call
them, after the shape of their vehicles that went out into the fields to dig,
blast dynamite, and listen to the sound waves underground in search of new
drilling sites). But where are the passages in the oral histories and boomtown
anecdotes telling about the surveyors who walked for miles across open land
to measure the company’s leases? In fact, The First One Hundred Years makes
no mention at all of Conoco’s presence in the 1950s West Texas oil fields,
much less of the survey crew that Bob D worked on during that time. I had
expected to go to the library and find these old books, flip to the index, and
quickly locate passages dedicated to the job my grandfather had done. My
expectations turned out to be misguided, though, and instead of reading
up on his role as a surveyor in the expansion of the oil business, I realized I
would need to piece the information together for myself.
Great changes have taken place in West Texas over the previous 150 years.
The area has gone from frontier country with U.S. Army outposts among
Native American lands before and after the Civil War; to the boomtowns,
railroad depots, and agricultural oasis in the desert during the mid-twentieth
century; to the shrunken population centers and remote tourist spots and
parklands of today. Pecos, a town that once served as a center for oil drillers
in the area and a hub for cotton farming, as well as home of Billie Sol Estes
and a fertilizer scandal in the early 1960s that touched Lyndon Johnson
and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, saw its population nearly double
in the 1950s from eight thousand to fourteen thousand people, then drop
back down to fewer than thirteen thousand by 1960, and fall still lower to
14

Introduction
fewer than nine thousand by 2010. Those fluxes are evident in boarded-up
windows and deserted lots along Pecos streets today, though a resurgence
in oil drilling in the area means hotel rooms are at a premium as energy
companies buy out entire blocks of rooms for their workers for extended
periods of time.
â&#x20AC;&#x201A;â&#x20AC;&#x201A;With this background in mind, I determined to visit the towns my
grandparents had known during the 1950s, to see for myself the area they
loved, and to know more of their story and the story of the land. I set off
on my West Texas travels with a sense that I was touring my familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past.
By the time my friends and I came back from that first camping trip, I
was just as enchanted with the charms of West Texas as my grandparents
had been for decades. We spent our ten days in West Texas soaking in the
laid-back atmosphere, kicking up dust on the trails through the desert, in
the mountains, and along the Rio Grande, and eating as many tacos and
drinking as many limonadas as we could. For all the miles we put on the
odometer, though, we barely made a beginning of all there was to see in
those far reaches of the state. Ten days is but a moment compared to the
thirteen years Bob D and Ann spent traversing those desert highways with
their children in the back seat and a one-wheel trailer hitched to the rear. My
curiosity had been piqued more than satisfied.

15

Bob D. Henderson’s Ford Country Sedan Station Wagon on a trip to North Texas to ship
cattle with his father. Bob D. Henderson’s collection.